Writing Styles

Miscellaneous General
1

Can this style of writing be safly streotyped to the left, or am I just being biased? I don’t really know how to describe it other than really long winded, pretensious, and full of obscure words and obscure name dropping.

I just made this up for a bad example:

While contemplating [insert hip director/author/philosopher here] i couldn’t help thinking [insert foreign, probably French, phrase here] as the work seems to go down two different paths. The first path speaks to the cynical, post-modern, 5th wave feminist Ludditte in me about a man trying to find his soul through a petit Bougeoise lifestyle and recapture the intamacy he had in his more id like adolecent times. You can see our author was heavily influenced by post Jungian thought. [insert ‘witty’ remark here].

I should have added a few words that 95% of people don’t know the definition to, but I’m not that clever. I don’t know what I just typed but it was kind of fun try it out, or better yet make a Mad Lib! The main question though, if this is leftist type writing (for exampl think of Sokol and the Science Wars) why does it exist? Why does the left use it more often?

2

This is what I would call pseudo-intellectual writing. Most such “intellectuals” are leftists, so you are not necessarily biased.

3

I think it’s more of an education level thing.

Look at the political makeup of any university and you might have your answer.

4

Yes, I agree, but I would say it is “pretence of knowledge” :wink:

5

The political right have no pretentions about being intellectual, they don’t attempt to construct any elaborate defence for their system. The left on the other hand are lacking when it comes to humility, they attempt to make a somewhat complicated defense of their system of robbery, as such they obfuscate the truth by their language to stop their whole system of thought as being exposed as a lie.

6

language is used for status signalling. pseudo intellectualism is one form of this where signalling that you are intelligent, not communicating useful information, is important. the reason that this works so well is that this type of signalling is most commonly used by males and is directed towards females. Females aren’t very good at analytical reasoning, so the things said only need to approximate the language used by actual academics.

Indeed in the liberal arts you see quite a bit of made up language that is obviously imitating the technical terms used in the sciences.

7

Sounds like you are a post-modernist for being post-post-modernist and creating a meta-meta.

Oh snap!

Criticizing of criticizing of criticizing of criticizing into infinite.

Seriously, this thread could become an academic paper itself.

8

They tend not to be as capable of it. It doesn’t take much analytical reasoning to sift through bullshit…

9

Nothing in that paragraph is really arguable in order to have an analysis, though. It could also be true and consistent with something if you put in the right words.